Bernie Sanders

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You have written a book about the city of Richmond, California, where you live, prefaced by Senator Bernie Sanders: « Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City ». This book shows us the experience of this city that has won struggles such as raise the local minimum wage, defeat a casino development project, challenge home foreclosures and evictions, and seek fair taxation of Big Oil and Big Soda.Can we say that the Richmond experience should inspire progressive activists in other cities around the world?

Steve Early: The struggle to revitalize and democratize Richmond, CA., a multi-racial, working class city of 110,000 near San Francisco, is part of a larger municipal reform trend in the U.S. This current emerged during a period of political deadlock at the state and federal level during the Obama Administration. Lire la suite »

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You wrote « After Postmodernism: An introduction to Critical Realism », and « The Bet, the: Truth in Science, Literature and Everyday Knowledges ». These two books lead to your concept of critical realism. Can you explain this concept to our readers?

Dr. Garry Potter: Critical realism emerged through the work of Roy Bhaskar around about the time of the emergence of postmodernism. Postmodernism, perhaps more than any other theoretical framework, encapsulated some of the incoherence of one of the long-standing poles of thought concerning social science: social constructivism. The other pole was/is, of course, positivism. Lire la suite »

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You devoted two books to Barack Obama: “The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power” and “Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics”. How do you judge Obama’s two presidential mandates?

Dr. Paul Street: Obama has been the neoliberal, imperial, and deeply conservative president many of us on the left expected him to be. I have written about this in a recent Truthdig essay titled “Obama’s Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump.” The first book you mention (The Empire’s New Clothes) is a detailed record of Obama’s service to the elite business class, to the U.S. global military empire, and to the continuing hold of institutional and societal racism in the U.S. Lire la suite »

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Do you think the United States can claim to be democratic simply by electing a woman president? Can we talk about democracy in the USA with a candidate of the financial lobbies and AIPAC?

Ann Garrison: No, of course not. No more than we could claim to be a democracy because we elected a Black president. These two elections signify nothing more than the inclusion of previously excluded classes of people in the super elite. The United States is an oligarchy of the .01%, 10% of the 1%. Any president who is not already among the .01%, like Bill Clinton, becomes part of the .01% by serving its interests and then peddling influence after leaving office. Lire la suite »